UT Austin recently hosted the largest gathering of electrical and computer engineering department heads from the U.S. and Canada organized by the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department Heads Association (ECEDHA). The 2012 ECEDHA Annual Conference and ECExpo represents the first time the association has partnered with a university to host the annual event, a model that the association hopes to continue.

UT ECE Professor of Innovation Robert Metcalfe recently reviewed New York Times Magazine writer Jon Gertner's history of Bell Labs, The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation, for The Wall Street Journal.

Read Dr. Metcalfe's review, Where the Future Came From, on The Wall Street Journal website.

Prof. Ramesh Yerraballi has been named the 2012 recipient of the Electrical Engineering Faculty Appreciation Award. The Student Engineering Council is hosting the award ceremony this Thursday, March 8th, 4-6pm in the SAC Ballroom.

If you can attend the ceremony to celebrate Ramesh’s award, please fill out the following form.

UT ECE alumnus Kyungtae Han has been named the winner of the 2012 Intel Achievement Award For Developing the Converged Platform Power Management Framework. This is the highest technical award at Intel. At the awards ceremony in San Francisco on May 5th, Dr. Han will receive the award from Intel President andCEO Paul Otellini.

Dr. Han received his PhD ECE from UT Austin in August 2006 under the supervision of Prof. Brian L. Evans. He works at Intel Labs in the Portland, Oregon, area.

The Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin hosted its eighth annual Edison Lecture Series on February 22-23, this year focusing on robotics. The series used robots as a platform to engage and excite youth from around central Texas about computing and engineering. During the past seven years, the series has reached nearly 22,000 students in the Austin area.

Prof. David Pan, Prof. Joydeep Ghosh and graduate students Duo Ding and Bei Yu have received the 2012 ASP-DAC Best Paper Award for their paper EPIC: Efficient Prediction of IC Manufacturing Hotspots With A Unified Meta-Classification Formulation. ASP-DAC is one of the premier conferences for Electronic Design Automation.

Professor Andrea Alù of UT ECE has been named the 2012 recipient of the SPIE Early Career Achievement Award. The award recognizes Andrea’s “pioneering contributions to optical metamaterials and plasmonic phenomena”. The SPIE Early Career Achievement Award is given to an early career professional in recognition of significant and innovative technical contributions to any of the engineering or scientific fields of interests to SPIE.

Professor Mikhail Belkin of UT ECE was awarded an NSF CAREER award for his work on Terahertz Semiconductor Laser Sources for Operation Above Cryogenic Temperatures. The Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program is a Foundation-wide activity that offers the National Science Foundation's most prestigious awards in support of junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education and the integration of education and research within the context of the mission of their organizations.

Prof. Andrea Alù’s research on cloaking a three-dimensional object, making it invisible from all angles, for the first time, has received attention from the BBC News and other major news sources. The idea, outlined in New Journal of Physics, could find first application in high-resolution microscopes.

Prof. Alexis Kwasinski of UT ECE travels to the worst natural disaster sites around the world to assess the damage inflicted on communication networks and electric power grids. Dr. Kwasinski has surveyed the aftermath of three major Gulf Coast hurricanes, including Katrina, and stood in the rubble caused by earthquakes in Chile, New Zealand, and Japan.